April 14, 2010

Alice Rostovski Miller was a well known psychoanalyst. Her dates are January 12, 1923 to April 14, 2010. Miller was born in Lwow Poland, and after the war she studied and worked in Switzerland and France. Although she was a practicing psychoanalyst she came to view Freudian and Jungian ideas as inadequate to deal with the cruelty even well-meaning parents inflicted on their children. 

Among her books are:
The Drama of the Gifted Child: The Search for the True Self, (1979)
The Untouched Key: Tracing Childhood Trauma in Creativity and Destructiveness. (1988)
Banished Knowledge: Facing Childhood Injuries, (1988)
Breaking Down the Wall of Silence: The Liberating Experience of Facing Painful Truth, (1990)
For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing and the Roots of Violence 1990
The Truth Will Set You Free: Overcoming Emotional Blindness and Finding Your True Adult Self, (2001)
The Body Never Lies: The Lingering Effects of Cruel Parenting, (2006)

In her first book she wrote:

“ Experience has taught us that we have only one enduring weapon in our struggle against mental illness: the emotional discovery and emotional acceptance of the truth in the individual and unique history of our childhood." So twentieth century. Still that is not our purpose right now.

Miller liked to find confirmation for her ideas in the biographies of artists. Here is something she wrote in For Your Own Good: 

Paul Klee is reknowned as a great painter of magical and poetic canvases. His only child may have been the one person who was familiar with his other side...Felix Klee, the painter's son.[said] ..:"He had two sides, he was full of fun; but he [was] also capable of playing his part in my upbringing by giving me an energetic whipping." Paul Klee made wonderful [puppets], presumably for his son.."He admitted that when I was at school he sometimes put on a performance for the cat..."

Miller's point is that the fact the father put on puppet shows for the child,  is considered a reason not to blame the father for the beatings of his son.  She goes on:

I have used this example to help readers free themselves from the cliches about good or bad parents. Cruelty can take a thousand forms and it goes undetected even today because the damage it does to the child and the ensuing consequences are still so little known.

Miller thinks  society has conspired to prevent children from understanding how they have been abused.

Understand we are not talking here about what normally counts as child abuse. That is not her focus, but rather the psychological cruelty children suffer and how it is hidden from everyone's sight by the emphasis on the parents' good intentions and the advice to forgive your parents. She points to the biblical commandment to honor thy parents as evidence of social forces that encourage amnesia about the pervasive extent of psychological child abuse.

No doubt a lot of what Miller points to is cruelty. But the answer at some point is surely to understand others through ourselves, not ourselves through our parents. At some point the chin up attitude must be to say we have all made mistakes, and forgive your parents and get on with life. Miller's scenario forbids this forgiveness and frankly overestimates the importance of reason in an irrational world. Miller's viewpoint seems like it just keeps people fretting about things they should have let go off a long time ago. The subjects she focuses on did not suffer more than anybody else and at some point you say I have other things to do with my life besides revealing a global conspiracy to hide subtle cruelty. I will be happy just making sure I myself do not do this. The growth is in forgiveness.